Senator Schumer has picked a bit of a fight with President Obama over of the administration’s increasingly bizarre policies in respect of Israel. New York’s senior senator laced into Secretary Clinton in an on-air talk with Nachum Segal, scoring his former colleague in the senate for her dressing down of Prime Minister Netanyahu. Mr. Schumer used the word “terrible” to describe the decision of the State Department to have its spokesman, P.J. Crowley, suggest that, as Mr. Schumer characterized it, “the relationship of Israel and the United States depends on the pace of negotiations.” The senator called it a “dagger” because “the relationship is much deeper than the disagreements on negotiations.” He said, according to a report from Jake Tapper of ABC, that some Jewish members of Congress would be meeting with the president in the next week or so to convey the message that the maneuvering against Israel must stop.

The more hard-headed figures in the press corps aren’t taking the senator’s hard line too seriously. The way it was captured in one headline on the ABC Web site is, “White House (Mildly) Slaps Schumer.” The headline the New York Daily News put over Kenneth Bazinet’s dispatch is, “Obama Aides Know It’s Just Chuck Being Chuck.” It quoted “inside sources” as saying there “are really no hard feelings at the White House” over Mr. Schumer’s “tirade on a radio show hosted by an Orthodox Jewish leader.” It’s not surprising. The Democrats have such a margin in the Senate at the moment that if they were going to do something, they would have already.

It is clear that if the idea is for the Senate to send the right signal on the Middle East, the smart move is not to have Mr. Schumer pay a visit to Mr. Obama. It would be to increase the Republican ranks in the upper chamber. It’s getting clearer by the day that the best way for New York to do that is for the GOP here to swing behind the candidacy of David Malpass, who has not only a famously clear-headed view of the political economy and the errors of the current administration on tax, fiscal and monetary matters. He also is showing quiet strength on foreign policy — as solid a view on Israel as any candidate we’ve encountered in New York. He characterizes the administration’s current policy of courting adversaries and snubbing friends as “harmful to U.S. interests and Israel’s interests,” as he put it to us over the phone today. Mr. Malpass is one figure the White House can’t dismiss as “Chuck being Chuck.”